[LAD] Carla (was... whatever)

[Filipe Coelho]

On 09.12.2017 15:56, Len Ovens wrote:
> I agree that Carla has a long list of deps. However, it is worth 
> building on one's own system and excluding some features. This is very 
> easy to do, if Carla doesn't find a depend, it just leaves features 
> requiring those depends out.

I have to confirm this, since I am the author of Carla I know what I am 
talking about ;)

Carla's dependencies are all optional, only needs a compiler to get the 
basic stuff working.
OSC support is done by liblo, so liblo is needed if you want OSC.
Same for a alsa and pulseaudio (using a bundled RtAudio).

The toolkits, as Paul said before, is to be able to load different kinds 
of toolkits that LV2 plugins use.
Usually hosts give that task to suil, so you don't see the dependency 
list directly.
But when installing jalv or qtractor for archlinux, because they depend 
on suil, expect it to pull gtk2, gtk3, qt4 and qt5.

Carla's frontend uses PyQt (either version 4 or 5), so you need that if 
you want the full GUI.
But carla works just fine without it, you just have to load single 
plugins or previously saved project files...

The dependency on zynaddsubfx is a leftover from when I started 
experimenting zynaddsubfx as a plugin.
I started it as an internal carla plugin to see how far I could take it, 
and how well it could work as a plugin.
It needed quite a few changes, which are now all upstream. Eventually I 
made the new code that makes zyn work as plugin, officially, without 
using Carla.
The plan is to make all the extra internal plugins (including zyn) a git 
submodule, and disable them by default on new builds.
This is already the case on the FreeBSD ports.


> This does mean the user does have to:
>  - build their own
>  - know what they need
>  - know why they are using Carla in the first place
>  - understand that Carla _tries_ to make up for the mistakes
>     of plugin developers or distro packagers. It is a tool
>     to make the best of a broken situation.

This is correct.

Carla is and will remain an advanced tool.
I have no intentions to dumb it down, I hate that practice myself.
All the options provided are very technical, and errors it reports when 
something misbehaves are very technical too.

Carla was born out of a personal need for a modular host that loaded all 
kinds of plugins.
That need (for me at least) still stands.
It might be that you don't really have a need for it, so just don't use 
it ;)